Poe’s poems favour lyricism over storytelling, style over substance. But when he combines the two, as he does in The Raven, his poetry is mesmeric.-Imran

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Poe was an American writer in the early 1800s. He was mostly a writer of short stories and poetry, and mostly about mystery, melancholy and darkness. Such is the tragedy of many great writers: he is appreciated more in death than he was in life and he’s now retrospectively credited with inventing detective fiction. Poe’s life was difficult. he suffered poverty and the deaths of loved ones. The loss of his paramours is a recurring theme in his poetry.

Something that stood out to me while reading Poe’s poems was the obvious themes of loss and melancholy. Death and darkness show up constantly, many of which are laments for things that Poe has lost. The best of these is The Raven, possibly Poe’s most famous poem. Many of the poems are heart-breaking, and if you’re paying attention, you can get a glimpse of the tragedies that shaped Poe’s life.

But not all of Poe’s poems are quite so tragic. There are others that carry themes of fantasy and dreams, of castles by the sea, of journeys or adventures. But storytelling isn’t a strong point of Poe’s poetry. The foreword notes that Poe favours lyricism and euphony over substance, and this is noticeable in many of Poe’s lesser known poems (one for example is about a lake. Just a lake). When he does try to emphasize storytelling, as in his longer poems, the results aren’t as memorable.

To his credit, Poe’s lyricism is excellent. His poems have mesmeric rhythms and many of them when read aloud have a hypnotic quality to them. Most notable among these is, once again, The Raven. I’d even call them musical and while many of them appear to mean little (e.g. The Bells… which is about bells), they sound beautiful.

Quite expertly on his part, Poe also varies his rhyming structures, often many times within the same poem. If you’re paying attention, you can even see him interlacing multiple rhyming structures together at the same time. Incredible how he does it actually. It’s something that’s better seen than described, but with that many constraints on rhyme and rhythm it’s understandable why the storytelling isn’t often that striking.

But where Poe does manage to combine powerful storytelling with his hypnotic lyricism, he’s at his strongest. This happens most often in his laments, when he’s mourning the loss of his young wife who died of tuberculosis. Annabel Lee, The Raven, Lenore; all of them seem to be expressions of despair at what he’s lost. It seems crass to say that out of his sadness he created something beautiful, so let me rather say that through his poetry we can come to understand his pain.

Poe’s poems favour lyricism over storytelling, style over substance. But when he combines the two, as he does in The Raven, his poetry is mesmeric.

Fight Club is a brutal satire, a sarcastic commentary on 21st century materialism. Maybe it’s also the story of a lonely man. A twisted book and an engaging movie.-Imran

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First rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club.

Second rule of Fight Club: you do not talk about Fight Club.

Allow me to break the first two rules and talk about Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s debut novel and still his most famous. When writing this review, it’s difficult for me to divorce my impression of the 1999 film from that of the book. The two are similar, inter-linked, two sides of the same object. I’d even say that they complement each other; so watching/reading one makes it worth reading/watching the other.

You wake up in a post-modern novel. When you have insomnia you’re never really awake, but you’re never really asleep either. The narrator goes to support groups to help with his insomnia: testicular cancer, flesh-eating bacteria, organic brain dementia. I cry, then you cry; babies don’t sleep this good. Until Marla shows up. Liar. Faker. Marla doesn’t have testicular cancer. Marla doesn’t even have testicles. You wake up on a plane. You meet Tyler Durden. The narrator’s house blows up. He’s got nowhere to go. And that’s how he ended up living with Tyler in a rundown hovel in the toxic waste part of town.

I am Imran’s overbearing devotion: Fight Club is brutal satire, it’s a sarcastic commentary on 21st century culture and all its rampant materialism. The fast cars and the branded underwear and the careers. You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank (that’s from the movie). It’s about pointless rebellions and emasculated men beating each other senseless. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, it’s because it’s not supposed to. Fight Club is an uncomfortable book and an uncomfortable movie and it’s the kind of thing that’s worth engaging with to take you out of your comfort zone. And it’s good, a flawed gem perhaps, but maybe a minute is all you can expect from perfection.

On the novel in particular, the style is great. The tone is detached and cynical, the descriptions dry and sarcastic. Palahniuk does have a tendency to overdo it with the shock value at times. The book examines many of the little idiosyncrasies and injustices of our modern culture, casts a jaded look at things we might not have noticed. And turns a lot of them on their heads. ‘Black comedy’ sounds like a fitting description.

There’s also a look at this narrator himself, this subdued man being driven crazy with boredom. His monotonous job and his ‘perfect’ life with its floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminium frames and it’s Haparanda sofas with the orange slip covers and his stainless steel dishwasher-safe Alle cutlery; and it’s abject loneliness. If any of this sounds vaguely familiar then Fight Club is almost definitely not what you need, but it’s a slap to the face; maybe a wakeup call. The movie and the book both have their merits; both are worth looking into.

I am Imran’s lacking conclusion: Fight Club is a brutal satire, a sarcastic commentary on 21st century materialism. Maybe it’s also the story of a lonely man. A twisted book and an engaging movie.

Like Nabokov says in his opening letter: Bend Sinister may be too clever for most. It’s interesting that it exists, but Nabokov has done better and it’s not for everyone.-Imran

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Vladimir Nabokov is a famous butterfly-collector who also wrote books. Plenty of them actually (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin). I’ve given plenty of background on the Russian rogue in my other book thoughts so let’s skip straight to the book shall we? Last chance to describe Nabokov’s literary career. Too late.

Bend Sinister: the Penguin Modern Classics edition opens with an annoyed Nabokov complaining that no one understood his book (such introductions almost always contain spoilers so I’d recommend you read it after the book). And looking back, the opening essay does put Bend Sinister is perspective. I could say that the book is about Adam Krug, a professor of philosophy. His wife has just passed away (poor Olga!), his son is motherless and he lives under the rule of the totalitarian Average Man Party led by his old schoolmate Paduk. There’s a narrative thread about the college using Krug’s relationship with Paduk to prevent itself from being shut down, but really what use is plot to a book like this? At first glance, the totalitarian regime might draw comparisons to Orwell or Kafka (as Nabokov points out in his letter) but there isn’t much of a connection. The totalitarian regime, the college’s struggles, even Krug’s son all lie in the periphery.

Bend Sinister is one of the strangest Nabokovian books I’ve read (and his books are usually strange). For one it is aware of being a book, and aware of both being written and read. The narrator is a mysterious presence, sometimes explaining Krug to us and other times changing his mind. There hardly even seems to be a central narrative thread. There are events, they unfold, but in many chapters there are other things of interest. Some chapters are about Russian literature, or the process of translation or jokes about language itself (it seems here that Nabokov enjoys himself the most). There are recollections from Krug’s past, descriptions of the society he lives in, passages about Paduk. If there is anything central to the book it may be the relationship between Krug and Paduk, or perhaps the incompetence of a totalitarian state (Nabokov believes the center is Krug and his son).

Perhaps it’s a compliment that the book fails to be summarized. And perhaps I am not alone when I say that I had difficulty in understanding it. Nabokov is often guilty of acute cleverness in his other works, only here he pushes it an extreme. Bend Sinister bears more similarity to Transparent Things in it’s opacity . The language contributes to this as well. Never before have a read anything with so magniloquent a style or so expansive a vocabulary. I hardly finished a page without retreating to a dictionary (sometimes even twice on a page) and while reading the book certainly did teach me many new words (Agglutinate? Divagation? Execrable?) it was frustrating at times. As his second English book following the linguistically stoic The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, perhaps Nabokov wanted to show the world his expertise in English. He’s a better speaker of it than I am certainly.

Like Nabokov says in his opening letter: Bend Sinister may be too clever for most. It’s interesting that it exists, but Nabokov has done better and it’s not for everyone.

Islam: A Short Story is 1400 years of history in 150 pages. Told like a story, light on the details, heavy on the understanding. Worthy insights.-Imran

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Karen Armstrong is something of an icon among religious historians. She’s written a truckload of accessible books on religion and everything God-related and, in particular, about the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Armstrong is a former Catholic nun and an Oxford scholar As of 2009, Armstrong unveiled a Charter for Compassion and is currently promoting compassion in a world she believes sorely needs it.

Islam: A Short History, is a short history of Islam (that was easy). It chronicles it’s founding in the late 500s by Muhammad, through the Ottoman empire and the Mongols and all the way to it’s modern incarnations. 1400 years worth is history is covered in about 150 pages, so Islam: A Short History is highly abridged. Yet, to it’s credit, very little is left out even if the details are skimpy.

The book provides a neat summary of Muhammad’s era (which could have been longer), and where it really excels is in Islam’s development. It provides explanations as to where and how the various sects, practices and philosophies of the religion arose, as well as how Islam spread through different parts of the world.

Armstrong tells a story, capturing the tensions and the motivations of the different groups in a sympathetic fashion. For the most impart, Islam: A Short History is an interesting web of human relations and divergent developments, but there is a tendency towards the end of the book for the storytelling to devolve into a mishmash of miscellaneous facts and names. To be fair, after around 1400 A.D., there are so many different Islamic countries and sects that it’s an incredible feat on Armstrong’s part just to keep up.

Of course, in historical accounts, there’s always the question of historical bias. More specifically: what kind of bias does Armstrong write with? There’s a definite sense of awe and appreciation on her part. She’s focuses on cultural development and the way the religion grew with changing culture and vice versa. She even remarks Islam was necessary for the intellectual and cultural development of the Arabs. She also admires Muhammad and seems bent on pushing his religious and secular achievements into the spotlight of Western appreciation. For the most part she does present a sympathetic view but at times, she can become apologetic, particularly when she’s discussing the extremist factions who show up later on.

Islam: A Short History is a crash course on Islam that contains more historic detail than the above-average Muslim knows, and great insights into the development of religion itself. Islam, like many religions, exists, and has existed, in a myriad of forms: Sunni, Shia, Salafi, Sufi, Faylasuf etc. each with further sub-categories. Karen’s interpretation of this is simple but profound. She argues that all religions must adapt over time to stay relevant to a changing world. But as they do, they deviate further away from their original ideal. In response to this, new groups arise to return the religion back to its roots. But in a changed world, these groups end up creating new movements entirely, accelerating the deviations even further. Left me thinking for quite a while. I think she may be right.

Islam: A Short Story is 1400 years of history in 150 pages. Told like a story, light on the details, heavy on the understanding. Worthy insights.

]]>https://imranlorgat.com/2014/10/17/islam-a-short-history-by-karen-armstrong-book-thoughts/feed/0Islam A Short History By Karen Armstrong - CopyimranlorgatIslam A Short History By Karen ArmstrongArctic Summer by Damon Galgut [Book Thoughts]https://imranlorgat.com/2014/10/11/arctic-summer-by-damon-galgut-book-thoughts/
https://imranlorgat.com/2014/10/11/arctic-summer-by-damon-galgut-book-thoughts/#respondSat, 11 Oct 2014 09:28:57 +0000http://imranlorgat.com/?p=618

Arctic Summer is a biographical-historical hybrid capturing E.M. Forster’s secret homosexuality. It’s a depiction of the times, is factually accurate, and it kept me interested.-Imran

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Damon Galgut is a South African novelist twice nominated for the Booker Prize for The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room. After his semi(?)-autobiographical novel, In A Strange Room, Galgut has moved onto full-blown biography. Arctic Summer is not, as the title suggests, about underwhelming warm seasons. No it’s a fictionalized (but accurate) biography of E.M. Forster, author of Passage to India.

Following the posthumous publication of his book Maurice, the world caught on that Forster was gay. A minorite, Forster called himself. In early 1900s Britain, homosexuality was as unfashionable as it ever was (illegal actually) and the book reminds us that Oscar Wilde was jailed for said offence not so long ago. Arctic Summer is an attempt to reconstruct Forster’s experience of living with his true nature kept secret. The heart of the story is Forster’s close friendship with Syed Ross Masood, to whom Passage to India is dedicated.

The novel does break out of Forster’s life. At times it becomes more of a historical novel framed by a biography than a biographical novel enlaced with history. The British colonization of India and the politics and racism along with it are excellently captured. There’s an understanding of both the British and the Indian cultures that helps us readers bridge the gap between the two. And Arctic Summer sugarcoats very little: the ugliness of colonialism comes through and we’re shown the British class system along with all it’s hateful elitism.

Back to Forster: Arctic Summer is personal. It’s introspective, and let’s us quite deep into what Galgut assumes is in Forster’s head. Of course, it is impossible to know what a man was thinking 100 years ago but I hear that the novel is accurate with regard to historical facts and and Forster’s behaviour. I’m hazarding an uneducated guess that many of the details regarding Forster’s relationships with various men are fictionalized to some degree, but it would have been criminal to let factual uncertainty get in the way of a good story. And Arctic Summer is a good story.

I actually wondered at times if Arctic Summer was written by the same writer as The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room. The sense of bleakness is not present, replaced instead by an air of mystique and adventure. Arctic Summer feels like a more traditional novel than Galgut’s others (longer too) but further in, there are the familiar themes that I’ve come to know Galgut by: the sense of isolation, of not belonging; the lack of closure and the imperfection of human relationships. And all of these themes fit with Forster’s story. His struggle with his sexuality and his failures to connect with people because of it make fascinating reading. But more than that it allows us to empathize with someone who society respected, but not for being himself.

Arctic Summer is a biographical-historical hybrid capturing E.M. Forster’s secret homosexuality. It’s a depiction of the times, is factually accurate, and it kept me interested.

400+ words and I feel I’ve said nothing meaningful about In a Strange Room. It’s excellent, it’s honest and it’s real. It’s worth the read.-Imran

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Ideas become more difficult to summarize in proportion to how much one knows about them. And as I read more of Damon Galgut, he becomes harder to summarize. This is a compliment, possibly more so than my assertion that his books are good. In A Strange Room lives in a very different space to The Good Doctor or The Imposter even if it is tied to them by a common soul. It was nominated for the Booker Prize if that matters to you. Read on if it doesn’t.

In a Strange Room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you? A traveller, perhaps. In three stories, in three places, in three journeys, the protagonist travels. Through Southern Africa, Northern Africa, India, he meets different people in different places at different times in his life. Sometimes this protagonist is our narrator Damon, and sometimes Damon is watching his old self as his actions and motivations become opaque in the distance of memory.

In a Strange Room is a book about travel, but it’s not the journey outside that’s of interest. It’s the journey inside, the journey discover the self and others from the viewpoint of someone who’s aware of how much he does not belong. Maybe In a Strange Room is Damon’s quest to find a home or companionship. Often Damon himself isn’t clear on what he’s looking for, but the book is minimalist, open enough allow many interpretations of its text and subtext.

So as the title may suggest, it’s a strange book, and describing it this way feels as though I haven’t described it at all. In a Strange Room may be about the process of reconstructing memory and, in that sense, the haziness of distant events is executed excellently. The narration swaps seamlessly between “I” and “he”, explores eminently how difficult it is to unravel memories, even of ourselves.

And the three stories themselves are emotional and human. There’s something liberating in stripping down to the minimum and travelling through strange lands, but tragedy comes through in the imperfections of human relationships. Like in The Good Doctor, the relationships are grounded in stark unapologetic realism. At times, In a Strange Room is heart-breaking, and at times it’s an emotional train wreck. And it lacks closure. But closure isn’t what In a Strange Room is about. It’s about loneliness and isolation, about the strangeness of life and human tragedy.

It may take some time to appreciate the style but it’s an honest book, and moving even if I didn’t always understand why. It’s difficult to say exactly what nature of enjoyment or engagement I derived from the book but there were times when I was absorbed completely and times when I was turning page after page. If I can say nothing else useful about the book then let me say it’s well-written.

400+ words and I feel I’ve said nothing meaningful about In a Strange Room. It’s excellent, it’s honest and it’s real. It’s worth the read.

The Good Doctor is a bleak chronicle carved from life, a web of unconnected connections, a solitary story in the middle of nowhere. An anti-novel: quality reading.-Imran

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South Africa has writers. Some excellent ones in fact, like Damon Galgut. He’s been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room, as well as raking in local awards. As of his 2014 release of Arctic Summer, his writing career continues. Yes: he’s alive. Quite strangely for me at present, the author I’m reading isn’t dead. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting him. Ironically, The Good Doctor contains the line: “The moment you put two people together in a room, politics enters in,” which may have been prophetic since I now write this review with the cognizance that Damon might actually read it.

The Good Doctor is Lawrence Waters, a young doctor idealistic to the point of being juvenile. Lawrence arrives at a run-down hospital with the mission of helping people. Run-down is a euphemism: the entire hospital is manned by 7 people in the middle of nowhere, is filthy and dilapidated and has barely the supplies or the patients to justify it’s existence. This only increases Lawrence’s conviction to regenerate the place. But Lawrence’s headstrong naivety is seen as a nuisance by his peers, and he clashes heads, especially with the book’s cynical narrator Frank, the only other full-time doctor at the hospital.

I could say that the book is about Lawrence’s struggle to save something that doesn’t want to be saved. Or perhaps it’s about Frank dealing with this unwelcome disruptive influence in his life. Or perhaps it’s a reflection of the childishly excessive (but half-blind) optimism of the new South Africa. The book is multi-faceted and presents much without overly steering the reader’s judgement.

The narrative style is loose and grounded, so entwined with reality that the question of whether or not it’s fiction becomes inconsequential. The book isn’t populated with characters, but with real people. They’re subtle but strongly realized; ordinary, but alive.

The stark realism I’ve seen in other South African writers, such as Coetzee, but Galgut’s is markedly different. It’s dry and gritty, interspersed with the unclean roughness of real life. There are unrequited feelings, conversations that go nowhere, narrative threads that vanish as mysteriously as they arise in more fantastic stories. Things change, the plot develops, webs of intrigue form, but The Good Doctor exists so separately from the space of narrative convention that it seems to parody everything an ordinary novel stands for.

And the heart of this anti-novel is human tragedy. Of the subtle vagaries of life and the isolation of being in a far-away place forgotten by the rest of the world. It’s good, let me say that much; one of the better novels I’ve read this year. It entertains in the way that a traditional novel is meant to but this novel isn’t traditional.

The Good Doctor is a bleak chronicle carved from life, a web of unconnected connections, a solitary story in the middle of nowhere. An anti-novel: quality reading.

You might find that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is complex, intricate and different; a search for an end to a book which has only beginnings.-Imran

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(William Weaver Translation)

You read a new review on Italo Calvino’s book. The review is new, the book isn’t. The review you are reading should convey some kind of understanding of the book’s subject matter, and perhaps some trivia about Calvino itself. Perhaps it will tell you that he was an Italian postmodern writer. Perhaps it will mention his famous books Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities. Or perhaps it will jump straight into the new review.

You begin reading If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. The first chapter engrosses you. But your copy contains some kind of misprint; there is no second chapter. Frustrated, you return to the bookstore only to learn that the publishers have made a mistake and printed the first chapter of a different book under Calvino’s name. You don’t care, you just want to read the second chapter of whatever you were reading. But when you get your hands on that book, it turns out to be another story entirely; and another one with no continuation. And so it continues as you search from book to book, through a romance, a war story, a crime thriller and more, as you try to find the end of a book which contains only beginnings.

The review may have suggested to you that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler is a sequence of opening chapters. But it should also suggest that between the chapters is a larger narrative, a quest to find these mysterious books, to find out who is responsible. By the end of this review, you will have understood that If On A Winter’s Night is a book about books. It explores the way to read them, it explores the way that they are read, it explores the way that are written, it explores the way in which you as the reader would interpret the book itself. In reading it you may read what Calvino didn’t know because you sought in it what you didn’t know.

And in reading If On A Winter’s Night, you will come to know that Calvino is eloquent, verbose. The reviewer is not sure if he’s a writer; the reviewer suggests that instead he is a painter, painting words instead of colours across the canvas that is the blank page. The review notes while the work is a translation, the prose is still beautiful.

By now, you are interested in reading Calvino’s Wintery book. You are intrigued by the changing novels, the novel second person style, the novelty of a book that is about reading itself. You may read it because you appreciate the complexity, the self-referential networks of lines that interlace and intersect. You may read it because of the artistry; because it is a novel aware of itself being written. You may read only because it is different. But whatever the reason, the final decision, dear reader, lies with you.

You might find that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is complex, intricate and different; a search for an end to a book which has only beginnings.

The Trial is a surreal book that may or engage or annoy you. Kafka goes the opposite direction to many authors: using the complex to show the simple.-Imran

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Franz Kafka is a German author of novels and short-stories, with most of them left unfinished at his time of death and published posthumously. In life, Kafka worked for an insurance company, something he despised but did in order to pay the bills. In death, Kafka has gone on to be considered one of the most ‘influential’ writers of his era (at least according to Wikipedia) and his works have earned him a word of his own: ‘Kafkaesque’. The word refers to the incredibly complex but ultimately senseless situations that show up in his works.

Enter The Trial, originally published as Der Prozess a decade after Kafka wrote it and left it unfinished. The Trial opens with the arrest of poor Josef K., for reasons unknown to him. The two officers that have arrested him don’t know why, and their supervisor doesn’t know why, but K. is assured that those in the know must have had a very good reason since the courts would never arrest someone without good cause. After his arrest, K. is free to go while his trial continues (being arrested isn’t that bad after all). And so a vexed K. attends court sessions, meets with an advocate and makes political connections as he builds a case against his crime.

The Trial is a book in which nothing happens. K. goes to great lengths to ensure that something happens, and the court officials and lawyers go to great lengths to explain why nothing could possibly be happening, but ultimately any hope of something happening would be senseless and futile. The court moves at its own pace, you must understand. And so The Trial starts out funny and then becomes tedious and then becomes inescapably bleak as Josef K. is caught further in an inextricably complex legal web. The world is interesting and Kafka’s absurdist reflection of our own world gives a look into the ridiculous and tedious futility that seems a part of our modern bureaucracies.

The book is intellectual in nature, but it’s also dry and intentionally tedious and so I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed reading it. It’s page after page of explanatory text that, instead of demystifying the situation, only serve to make it murkier and murkier; indeed every line seems to contradict or dis-explain the one that came before it. I suppose it’s funny in it’s own peculiar way and the dialogue is excellent, but I find that reflecting on it more interesting than actually reading it. You might be engaged by Kafka, or you might be put off by him entirely.

Being unfinished, the novel also lacks a true resolution. There’s a massive disconnect between the penultimate and the final chapter that leads me to believe that a lot more was meant to take place before the novel’s sudden conclusion.

The Trial is a surreal book that may or engage or annoy you. Kafka goes the opposite direction to many authors: using the complex to show the simple.

-> Listen: Breakfast of Champions is a harsh tour of mankind. Powerful and depressing and so on. For Vonnegut’s admirers: bitter food for thought, for others: poison to be avoided.-Imran

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-> Kurt Vonnegut is a writing machine that coverts food and sunlight into literature. He’s not made-up. And he wrote Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five and so on. Before he wrote those he was in the army and didn’t write doodley-squat. The army is a bunch of people that are trained to kill other people. Kurt Vonnegut saw a lot of people killed in Dresden Germany. Then he became a writing machine and converted all of that into books. And so on.

-> Listen: Breakfast of Champions isn’t about breakfast. It’s about Philboyd Studge. Studge tells us about two meat machines named Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover. Kilgore Trout is a writer of some 200+ novels that nobody wants to read. His stories only get published as filler material in pornographic magazines about beavers. A beaver looks like this:

-> Dwayne Hoover is a fabulously well-to-do business man who owns an auto dealership, a tourist hotspot and an inn amongst other businesses. He started out as an orphan. An orphan is a person with no parents. Dwayne Hoover has some bad chemicals in his brain. And when he reads one of Kilgore Trout’s books it’s going to throw him over the edge into a violent rampage. Trout’s book is letter to the reader that they are the only person with free will on the entire planet and that everyone else is a robot. It was probably a bad idea to write this book. Because someone with bad chemicals might read it. And so on.

-> Listen: Breakfast of Champions is also about other things. It’s about America and global culture. It’s about race, and sex, and violence, and wealth, and poverty, and mental illness, and advertising, and slavery, and consumerism, and cows. A cow is an animal that looks like this:

-> Breakfast of Champions also has drawings in it too in case you get bored. Hopefully you won’t. The book is pretty good. And so on. It reads like an alien describing Earth and mankind to his fellows. Humanity is related to the reader without any justification or context. It’s fascinating. It’s also about writing. And characters. The line between truth and fiction blurs and then dissolves and then vanishes entirely until truth is fiction and fiction is truth.

-> Eliot Rosewater from God Bless You, Mr Rosewater shows up. Breakfast of Champions feels like the brother of that book. Read them together. But be careful. Both of them are depressing. If you have bad chemicals I wouldn’t recommend them. The book is poisonous like The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s powerful like much of Vonnegut’s work. It might make you irritable or moody and so on. Read if you have a deep interest in Vonnegut’s writings. It’s great. But otherwise avoid it like the plague.

-> Listen: Breakfast of Champions is a harsh tour of mankind. Powerful and depressing and so on. For Vonnegut’s admirers: bitter food for thought, for others: poison to be avoided.

]]>https://imranlorgat.com/2014/09/05/breakfast-of-champions-by-kurt-vonnegut-book-thoughts/feed/0Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut - CopyimranlorgatBreakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut500full755798